Redating the Sphinx

The following is a re-edited version of my report to the World History
Association on the Sphinx controversy that was published in the
World History Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring-Summer
1994), pp. 1-4.

The Sphinx Controversy

A research team has discovered physical evidence that the Great Sphinx of Giza,
Egypt, may be at least half again and possibly over twice as old as it was
assumed to be. A date of between 5000 and 7000 BCE or earlier challenges the
accepted chronology of world civilization. In response, archaeologists have
thrown mud at geologists, historians have been caught in the middle, and the
Sphinx, having revealed one secret, challenges us to unravel even greater ones.

The discovery originated half a century ago in the work of a neglected
French scholar, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1891-1962). Between 1937 and 1952,
Schwaller undertook a survey of the Egyptian Temple of Luxor. His measurements
of the floorplan and other detailed observations of the ruins disclosed
geometrical relationships not previously suspected. These were confirmed by
French archaeologists. Schwaller found similar relationships at other sites. He
reported his findings in 1949 and gave a fuller account in 1957.[1] A reviewer
for the Journal of Near Eastern Studies urged his colleagues to pay
serious attention to Schwaller's work, which challenged the notion of Egypt's
mathematical inferiority and suggested a new dimension to Egyptian religious
belief.[2] But Schwaller stirred up opposition by the speculative meanings that
he assigned to Egyptian architecture and inscriptions, and other scholars
dismissed his findings.

Schwaller observed a curious physical anomaly in the pyramid complex at
Giza. The erosion on the Sphinx, he noted, was quite different from the erosion
observable on other structures. Schwaller suggested that the cause of erosion
on the Sphinx was water rather than wind-borne sand. At the time, nobody
understood the implications of this observation and it went largely unnoticed
until the 1970s, when the independent Egyptologist John Anthony West took up
the question.[3]

What is now the Sphinx head was probably at one time an outcrop of rock. The
240-foot body of the monument, in the shape of a recumbent lion facing east,
was excavated from the limestone bedrock of the Giza plateau, forming an open
enclosure around it. A small temple, the "Sphinx Temple," stands in
front of the monument. This and an adjacent temple to the south, known as the
"Khafra Valley Temple," originally stood close to the Nile river. The
Valley Temple is at one end of a long 1600 foot causeway that leads to the
Mortuary Temple in front of the Pyramid of Khafra (Chephren). The Sphinx and
Valley Temples consist of huge limestone blocks quarried from the enclosure and
refaced with Aswan granite. To the northeast of Khafra's pyramid lies the Great
Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) and to the southwest lies the Pyramid of Menkaura
(Mycerinus). Causeways also link the Khufu and Menkaura pyramids to valley
temples along the ancient Nile. Archaeologists attribute the Sphinx to the Old
Kingdom fourth dynasty ruler Khafra, who reigned in the mid-2500s BCE.[4]

West compared the erosion on the Sphinx, on its temples, and on the
enclosure walls to the erosion of other structures on the Giza plateau. On the
Sphinx and its nearby walls, the rock was worn badly, giving it a sagging
appearance. Edges were rounded and deep fissures were prominent. On structures
elsewhere on the plateau, the surfaces showed only the sharper abrasion of wind
and sand. Egypt experienced torrential rainfall in the millennia that marked
the post-glacial northward shift of the temperate zone rainbelt. With some
interruptions this period lasted from about 10,000 to 5000 BCE, turning the
Sahara from green savanna into a desert. A shorter period of rainfall lasted
from about 4000 to 3000 BCE, tapering off by the middle of the third
millennium.[5] West thought that flooding from the post-glacial transition
caused the distinctive weathering on the Sphinx complex, which meant that the
Sphinx must have been carved during or before the transition.[6] Orthodox
archaeologists refused even to consider West's hypothesis. But in 1990 West
persuaded Robert M. Schoch, a geologist at Boston University, to examine the
question. Curious, Schoch agreed and the two visited Giza in June 1990.

Archaeologists agreed that the Sphinx complex stood close to earlier flood
levels and that flooding probably reached the base of the Sphinx on occasion.
However, flood levels have declined since Old Kingdom times.[7] Schoch observed
that erosion was heaviest on the upper parts of the Sphinx and enclosure walls,
not around the base, where flooding should have undercut the monument. This
upper surface weathering was typical of damage by rainfall, as were the
undulating impaction pattern and fissures on the Sphinx and nearby walls.
Schoch noticed that the limestone blocks on the Sphinx and Khafra Valley
Temples were similarly eroded and that some of the refacing stones appeared to
have been form-fitted to the eroded blocks behind them. Inscriptions suggest
that the refacing stones dated from the Old Kingdom, which meant that the
original walls must have eroded long before.[8]

On a second trip to Giza in April 1991, West and Schoch brought Thomas
Dobecki, a geophysicist from Houston, Texas, to carry out a seismic survey of
the enclosure foundations to determine whether the underlying rock showed
evidence of precipitation damage. The degree of subsurface weathering could be
measured by bouncing sound waves off of deeper layers of rock. With the
permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, the team carried out
sound-wave tests through the floor of the enclosure.

Schoch and Dobecki discovered that the enclosure floor in front and
alongside of the Sphinx had weathered to a depth of six to eight feet. They
also discovered that the back of the enclosure had weathered only half as far.
Schoch concluded that the floor behind the Sphinx may have have been excavated
during the Old Kingdom but that the sides and front of the monument were twice
as old. Assuming a linear rate of weathering, Schoch estimated the date of the
Sphinx and most of the enclosure to between 5000 and 7000 BCE, far earlier than
the date of 2500 assumed by archaeology. Schoch noted that weathering could
have been non-linear, slowing as it got deeper because of the increasing mass
of rock overhead. On this assumption, the Sphinx could have been significantly
older than 7000 BCE.[9]

Egyptologists dated the Sphinx to Khafra from several kinds of evidence. A
stela from the New Kingdom reign of Thutmose IV (1401-1391 BCE) stands in front
of the monument, and an inscription that has since flaked off contained the
first syllable of Khafra's name. Statues of Khafra found in his Valley Temple
also seemed to associate the complex with Khafra, and the Sphinx head was
assumed to be his as well. Finally, the causeway from Khafra's pyramid was
built into the Khafra Valley Temple.[10]

There was some uncertainty about the date even before West opened the
question. Egyptologists agree that repair work to fill in fissures or to
protect corroded areas on the monument took place in the New Kingdom no later
than about 1400 BCE.[11] This gave little over a millennium for the erosion on
the Sphinx to have reached such proportions as to require protective mortaring
and partial covering. The causeway to Khafra's Mortuary Temple was not
weathered like the Sphinx complex, and the other evidence linking Khafra to the
complex was circumstantial. The syllable khaf, for example, could have had
other meanings.

West exploded one piece of supposed evidence. With the help of a New York
City police artist, Detective Sgt. Frank Domingo, West compared the head of the
Sphinx with a known head of Khafra. Sergeant Domingo generated profiles of the
two heads by computer and by hand and found a very different facial structure
in the profile of the Sphinx compared to the profile of Khafra. The difference
is easily seen in photographs of the two heads.[12]

West and Schoch presented their evidence with considerable trepidation
before the Geological Society of America meeting in San Diego on October 23,
1991.[13] Instead of finding some obvious flaw in their results, a number of
geologists offered their support. In newspaper interviews and private
correspondence, however, other geologists raised two objections. One asked if
the seismic refraction data coincided with a natural fluctuation in the rock
layer itself. In fact, the seismic profile did not follow the natural dip of
the rock.[14] Another geologist proposed that the entire Sphinx , and not just
the head, was a natural outcrop of rock. Such an outcrop, known in geology as a
"yardang," could have eroded for millennia before being carved. But
the Sphinx body and nearby temple blocks matched the stratification pattern of
the excavated bedrock. They had clearly been carved out of the plateau along
with the enclosure floor. Only the head could have been an outcrop. Schoch
believed that the head, which was too small in proportion to the body, had
probably been recarved in historic times from an earlier lion's head.[15] As
publicity for the findings began to appear, some archaeologists denied the
possibility of an earlier date. "There's just no way that could be
true," countered one scholar, who pointed to the absence of known
government and civilization from the earlier period.[16] "There are no big
surprises in store for us," declared another scholar.[17]

The American Association for the Advancement of Science scheduled a session
to debate the issue at its annual meeting in Chicago on February 7, 1992.[18] A
leading authority on the Sphinx, Mark Lehner, director of the American Research
Center in Cairo, defended an Old Kingdom date for the Sphinx. He was joined by
a geologist, K. Lal Gauri of the University of Louisville, who had studied the
Sphinx for a decade. Robert Schoch and Thomas Dobecki defended their results
suggesting an earlier date.

After reviewing the standard reasons for dating the Sphinx to Khafra, Lehner
asked the basic question raised by his colleagues in archaeology: where was the
civilization that had to have existed to carve the Sphinx and build the temples
so many millennia before the Old Kingdom? Archaeology had found no evidence of
civilization in Egypt that far back. The Egyptians of the post-glacial
transition were primitive "hunters and gatherers" who could not have
built such a monument.[19]

Gauri circulated a short paper that attributed the erosion on the Sphinx
primarily to geochemical effects associated with either an upward seepage of
groundwater or with atmospheric condensation and evaporation, which occurred
even in the dry climate of the area.[20] But in his own paper, Schoch addressed
this objection. Until recently, the water table lay too far below the enclosure
floor to be a serious factor. There was evidence of condensation damage to the
Sphinx and its temples, but such damage was common to all of the structures on
the Giza plateau and was the least serious kind of weathering. It could not
account for the nature and severity of the impaction patterns on the Sphinx and
its temples.[21]

To the problem of archaeological context for an earlier Sphinx, Schoch
replied that urban centers had existed in the eastern Mediterranean at Catal
Huyuk from the seventh millennium and at Jericho from the ninth millennium
BCE.[22] At Jericho there were large stone walls and a thirty foot tower. No
such settlement had been found in Egypt itself but clearly there was
civilization in the region. More evidence could be under millennia of Nile
river silt. [23]

The stone blocks at Jericho were smaller than the 100 ton blocks used to
build the Sphinx temples. But the Sphinx temples were of simple post-and-lintel
construction. The prehistoric inhabitants of Britain were able to erect
Stonehenge, erecting 40-50 ton stones with only the building technology of a
Neolithic society.[24] A very early date for the Sphinx and its temples is not
implausible. In denying the Sphinx an earlier date, Egyptologists have
unintentionally denied to the people of late prehistoric Egypt an engineering
ingenuity that no one has denied to the people of late prehistoric Britain.

The AAAS meeting broke up in words that, according to The New York
Times, "skated on the icy edge of scientific politeness."[25] A
writer for the AAAS magazine Science wrote that Schoch "hadn't
convinced many archaeologists or geologists" of his findings.[26] In fact,
Schoch had received offers of support from geologists after the October and
February meetings. Even some archaeologists accepted his geological findings
without conceding the conclusion to which they pointed.[27] West spent the next
eighteen months producing a documentary for television that attracted thirty
million viewers when it aired in the United States on November 10, 1993.[28]

The Giza monuments have long been a subject of mystery and speculation.
Arabs called the Great Sphinx the "Father of Terrors," while many
Western writers have seen in the Pyramids everything from tombs to secret
wisdom.[29] John Anthony West has suggested that an ice age date for the Sphinx
raises anew the question of a lost ice age civilization, possibly the Atlantis
of ancient legend.[30] The evidence dating the Sphinx to an earlier time does
not prove the Atlantis legend. But if the hypothesis of rainfall erosion is
true, it does call the known chronology of African and indeed world
civilization into question. At minimum, I think, the dating of the Sphinx must
now be treated as an open question.

The evidence for an earlier Sphinx raises even deeper questions of its own:
If the Sphinx complex is so much older, who built it and why? Should we be more
tentative in what we assume about the first half of the last ten thousand
years? If so, how should that affect what we teach about the second half? Some
answers may be forthcoming in the next few years as the new findings are
examined and tested. Until then, the Sphinx challenges us to rethink our
history and keep an open mind.

8. Schoch's preliminary report was Robert M. Schoch, "How Old is the
Sphinx? A Draft Status Report as of 10 January 1992, " sent by Schoch to
this author, 28 January 1992. A published version appeared as Robert M. Schoch,
"Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza," KMT: A Modern Journal of
Ancient Egypt, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 1992), pp. 52-59, 66-70.

9. For the seismic results, see Schoch, "How Old is the Sphinx?"
pp. 17-19, and Thomas L. Dobecki and Robert M. Schoch, "Seismic
Investigations in the Vicinity of the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt,"
Geoarchaeology, Vol. 7, No. 6 (1992), pp. 527-544.

10. Selim Hassan, The Sphinx: Its History in the Light of Recent
Excavations (Cairo, 1949), pp. 88-91 still provides the best summary of the
evidence for a Khafre attribution. Hassan cautions that the evidence is
circumstantial.

11. For the history of repair work on the Sphinx, see Mark E. Lehner,
"The ARCE Sphinx Project: A Preliminary Report," American Research
Center in Egypt Newsletter, No. 112 (1980), pp. 3-33.

12. For Sgt. Domingo's findings, see West, Serpent in the Sky (1993), pp.
230-232. For photographs of the two heads, see John Anthony West, The
Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt: A Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient
Egypt (New York, 1985), pp. 148-149.

13. For an abstract of their presentation, see R.M. Schoch and J.A. West,
"Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt," Annual Meeting,
Geological Society of America, Vol. 23, No. 5 (1991), p. A253.

14. See Schoch, "How Old is the Sphinx?" p. 37-38.

15. See the comments of Farouk El-Baz of Boston University and Schoch's
reply in Boston University Today, 11-17 November 1991, p. 7.

22. For Catal Huyuk, see J. Mellaart, Catal Huyuk: A Neolithic Town in
Anatolia (London, 1967), and for Jericho, see Dame Katherine Kenyon,
Archaeology in the Holy Land, 4th ed. (London and New York, 1979). For
an overview of late prehistoric Egyptian settlement, see William C. Hayes,
Most Ancient Egypt, ed. Keith C. Seele (Chicago and London, 1964-65).

23. Abstracts of Papers, 1992 AAAS Annual Meeting, p. 202.

24. For a reconstruction of how Stonehenge could have been built, see R.J.C.
Atkinson, Stonehenge (London, 1956), pp. 125-135.

25. The New York Times, 9 February 1992, p. 34.

26. "Sphinx Riddle Put to Rest?" Science, Vol. 255, No.
5046, 14 February 1992, p. 793. The article reports that radioisotope dating of
the Sphinx is not possible. In fact, radioisotope analysis of surface
interactions with cosmic radiation, a new technique, would date the rock's
first exposure to the sky. The Egyptian Government has not permitted the taking
of microsamples from Giza monuments for radioisotope dating.

27. See the remarks of Lanny Bell of the University of Chicago in The
Boston Globe, 23 October 1991, p. 8, and John Baines of Oxford University
in The Independent [London], 14 October 1991, p. 17.

28. Broadcast on the NBC network at 9:00 PM EST. The documentary won a 1993
Emmy Award for Best Research and a nomination for Best Documentary.

29. For a survey of speculation about the Giza monuments, see Peter
Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid (Harper and Row, New York, 1971).